Teresa Davoli
New York University, NY·Genetics
Cancer cells often carry the wrong number of chromosomes, or the wrong number of copies of their DNA, while normal cells almost never do. Mistakes in copying or repairing DNA also build up over a lifetime and drive cancer.
- Fields
Genetics
Biology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
aneuploidy
chromosome copy number
copy number alterations
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Compare newly engineered aneuploid human cells with diploid cells for growth in vitro and in vivo, escape from cell death, stress survival, and control of transcription and translation.
- Identify synthetic lethal genes and pathways that, when blocked, stop the growth and survival of aneuploid tumor cells but not normal cells, using a systematic screening approach.
- Analyze proteins and phosphoproteins, mainly in colorectal tumor samples from patients, to learn how chromosome gains and losses affect protein stability and pathway regulation.
- Build MutSensor, a set of mutation reporters more than 50-fold more sensitive than existing methods, using the Genetic Writing and Delivery system to place them precisely in mammalian cells.
- Identify the genes that control mutation frequency across human cell types, using loss- and gain-of-function screening libraries read out by MutSensor reporters.
More about the research
Both projects ask how these large and small genetic changes arise. They also ask how such changes help tumors grow, and whether they expose weak points that drugs could target.
Why it matters
Chromosome changes are common in tumors but absent from normal tissue. Finding the weak points of aneuploid cancer cells could therefore reveal new biomarkers and drug targets for personalized cancer therapy. MutSensor could give researchers a sensitive tool for finding the genetic factors behind mutations in cancer and other diseases.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Juan Lucas Argueso
Colorado State University-Fort Collins, CO·Genetics
Measure rates of copy number variation (CNV), loss of heterozygosity (LOH), and whole-chromosome gain or loss in dividing and meiotic budding yeast cells, using custom, highly sensitive cell-based assays.
Nathaniel Sharp
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether yeast cells of a species' rarer type, haploid or diploid, have higher mutation rates, by measuring ploidy-specific mutation patterns in haploid- and diploid-dominant yeast species.
Richard Kolodner
University of California-San Diego, CA·Genetics
Identify human genes whose loss sensitizes cells to potent FEN1 inhibitors through expanded CRISPR-dropout screens in cell lines and mice, defining synthetic lethal partners of this flap-trimming endonuclease.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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